furthermore, i think being sceptical is a very sane approach to life. and i find alarmism and scaremongering very unhelpful and misguided strategies. finally, topics that continuously get hyped in the media tend to become very boring very quickly.

in a nutshell, the sceptic argument is something like this: scientists have conspired with politicians to generate a climate of fear based on fraud and pseudoscience. to quote lubos motl, a former harvard string theorist and passionate climate sceptic: "to summarize, what WG2 [the IPCC Working Group II] is saying is mostly a shameful piece of crap [...].", "[the IPCC is a] bureaucratic tumour of professional parasites and liars [...]." taken from his blog http://motls.blogspot.com/

i am very willing to consider the possibility, that there has been fraud, incompetence, an existing hidden agenda, exaggerated alarmism, and an environmental ideology in the climate activist camp. however, i would also assign a similar level of fraud, incompetence, existence of conspiracy theories, denial, and political ideology driving climate scepticism. considering the possible distribution of deceitful human beings in the population, i would be very surprised if they all turned out to be climate activists or climate scientists.

so, how to see through the misinformation and rationally try and get to the reality of the situation? well, i think this is actually quite easy. need to know stuff about cern and higgs bosons? ask a particle physicist. need to understand things about the climate? well, ask a climate scientist. and as climate scientists represent one of the biggest scientific communities (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlyorcJ28UA) this should be easy.

so what are these people, who professionally work in the field, and who are assembling the vastly growing body of knowledge on the climate saying? well, basically this:

It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.

This newspaper believes that global warming is a serious threat, and that the world needs to take steps to try to avert it. That is the job of the politicians. But we do not believe that climate change is a certainty. There are no certainties in science. Prevailing theories must be constantly tested against evidence, and refined, and more evidence collected, and the theories tested again. That is the job of the scientists. When they stop questioning orthodoxy, mankind will have given up the search for truth. The sceptics should not be silenced.

the problem

so, what is the problem then?

i have a big problem when a whole community of scientists gets successfully branded in the public opinion as a bunch of lying, incompetent, alarmist and fanatically driven people producing nothing but pseudo-science in an ongoing global effort to dupe the public. the tactics with which this was achieved (e.g., discredit the scientists and the science, imply that there is an hidden agenda and ideological motivation, conjure up conspiracy theories, select people with no professional training in the subject as public spokespeople, pay public relations firms and lobby groups to instil a sense of uncertainty and confusion in the public, promote obscure ideas and fringe theories, ...) painfully remind me of creationism.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/11/21/806905/-Climate-Denial-Sociopathology,-Creationism:-Hacked-Emails,-Piltdown

unfortunately, it is so much easier to be "educated" via blogs, youtube and the like than actually read the abstract of a scientific paper on the subject. in my opinion this accounts for the terrible signal to noise ratio in the public discussion, given by the multitude of uninformed voices of opinionated people thinking they are experts on climate science. and then you get this:

Just 57 percent think there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, down 20 points in just three years, a new poll says. And the share of people who believe pollution caused by humans is causing temperatures to rise has also taken a dip.

in effect, the sceptics offer no alternate hypothesis to the issue and are basically just saying "no, you're wrong".

a sensible attitude:

Scientists will continue to monitor the global climate and the factors which influence it. It is important that all legitimate potential scientific explanations continue to be considered and investigated. Debate will continue, and the Royal Society has just hosted a two day discussion meeting attended by over 300 scientists, but it must not be at the expense of action. Those who promote fringe scientific views but ignore the weight of evidence are playing a dangerous game. They run the risk of diverting attention from what we can do to ensure the world's population has the best possible future.

in my opinion, an advisable and sane strategy is the so-called "precautionary principle". this is detailed in a study of the reinsurance company swiss re on the topic (remember, they have an economic interest in finding out what is really going on, as they are the ones who will pay if things actually go wrong) published in 2007, as a useful tool for decision-making when there is uncertainty and the stakes are highhttp://www.swissre.com/resources/35aee480469b0764a38fb31f84a810e3-ULUR-75GHUN_insights_August_2007.pdf.

i believe even a small indication that humans could be responsible in tipping the balance of a complex and life-sustaining system, such as the global climate is, warrants action. especially, as 100% certainty and unison are elusive goals. however, what this action should be in detail is a whole other can of worms, involving governments, politicians, and generally lobbying and special interest groups, next to scientists...

so to conclude, sceptical, yeah, unscientific, no.

epilogue

it may be a bit disconcerting, but the emergent rules of how science is done in the world are these: new scientific results are reviewed by scientists working in the specific fields and get published in scientific journals if deemed relevant and correct. the importance or prestige of a journal is reflected in its so called impact factor. this is so from quantum physics to the study of complex systems. it is not a perfect set-up and has its drawbacks. but judging, for instance, by the breakneck-speed of technological advances witnessed today, which is founded in the body of knowledge assembled by the various communities of scientists, things could be far worse...

i often marvel at the emergent collective intelligence of ants, an assemblage of pretty unintelligent individuals, to form an adaptive, self-organizing superorganism, living in a sustainable balance with its environment. having said this, i find it one of the most perplexing observations, that individual intelligence appears to hinder the emergence of collective intelligence, as demonstrated by the human race and its relationship with the environment.

addendum

in the weeks after having written the above post, my severely biased science sources gave me the following;-)
log: february/march 2010

Contributions of Stratospheric Water Vapor to Decadal Changes in the Rate of Global Warming; 28 January 2010

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1182488v1
"Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000. Here, we show that this acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25% compared to that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases."

State of Flux: Images of Changehttp://climate.nasa.gov/stateOfFlux/index.cfm
"Each week State of Flux will be featuring images of different locations on planet Earth, showing change over time periods ranging from centuries to days"

WIREs Climate Changehttp://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WiresJournal/wisId-WCC.html
An important new forum to promote cross-disciplinary discussion of a global phenomenon with long-term societal implications.
An authoritative, encyclopedic resource addressing key topics from diverse research perspectives.

Why scientists must be the new climate sceptics; 4 March 2010http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18609-why-scientists-must-be-the-new-climate-sceptics.html
"Science needs to fight back, but not just by attacking its critics. Scientists need to reclaim the badge of "scepticism". They need to show that although the essentials of global warming are settled, the field itself is alive with debate and revision, as all science should be. They need to tell the public that there are things in the science that are open for debate, even if those things do not detract from the case for action."

Climate Change; 19 February 2010http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PWDFzWt-Ag
"The Internet was abuzz with a quote from Professor Phil Jones that there has been no global warming since 1995. But is that what he actually said?"

The Economist: The clouds of unknowing; 18 March 2010
There are lots of uncertainties in climate science. But that does not mean it is fundamentally wrong http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15719298
"No one doubts that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, good at absorbing infra-red radiation. It is also well established that human activity is putting more of it into the atmosphere than natural processes can currently remove. Measurements made since the 1950s show the level of carbon dioxide rising year on year, from 316 parts per million (ppm) in 1959 to 387ppm in 2009. Less direct records show that the rise began about 1750, and that the level was stable at around 280ppm for about 10,000 years before that. This fits with human history: in the middle of the 18th century people started to burn fossil fuels in order to power industrial machinery. Analysis of carbon isotopes, among other things, shows that the carbon dioxide from industry accounts for most of the build-up in the atmosphere. "

book review: "The Real Global Warming Disaster"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/15/real-global-warming-christopher-booker
"[The author's] position would require that you accept something like the following:
1) Most of the world's climate scientists, for reasons unspecified, decided to create a myth about human-induced global warming and have managed to twist endless measurements and computer models to fit their case, without the rest of the scientific community noticing. George W Bush and certain oil companies have, however, seen through the deception.
2) Most of the world's climate scientists are incompetent and have grossly misinterpreted their data and models, yet their faulty conclusions are not, as you might imagine, a random chaos of assertions, but all point in the same direction.
There's a third option: the world's climate system is hugely complex, hard to predict and constantly surprising; yet in the long term the world is getting warmer, for reasons we basically understand, and there is good reason to believe that humans are mostly responsible for it."

Debunking Lord Monckton Part 1http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfA1LpiYk2o
"He's everywhere on the climate denial circuit. He's not a scientist. He's a classics major and journalist. How is it that he's been able to sell himself to climate deniers as their number one spokesman?"

Scientists refute carbon capture doubts; 26 April 2010http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63P4FQ20100426
"Geologists refuted on Monday a report which in January had cast doubt on a technology to bury greenhouse gases underground, and on which some policymakers have pinned hopes to fight climate change."

Jeremy Jackson: How we wrecked the ocean; 5 May 2010http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0VHC1-DO_8
"In this bracing talk, coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson lays out the shocking state of the ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse."

---

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science; Science 7 May 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5979, pp. 689 - 690http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/689
"We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of politicalassaults on scientists in general and on climate scientistsin particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientificfacts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientificconclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. Whensomeone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutelycertain before taking any action, it is the same as saying societyshould never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophicas climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk forour planet.Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basiclaws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature,and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings,scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designedto find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial—scientistsbuild reputations and gain recognition not only for supportingconventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating thatthe scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a betterexplanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einsteindid. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeplytested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-establishedtheories" and are often spoken of as "facts." For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that ourplanet is about 4.5 billion years old (the theory of the originof Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about14 billion years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today'sorganisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory ofevolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by thescientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could showthese theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into thiscategory: There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistentobjective evidence that humans are changing the climate in waysthat threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly,on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typicallydriven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effortto provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies theevidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involvethousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensivereports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes.When errors are pointed out, they are corrected. But there isnothing remotely identified in the recent events that changesthe fundamental conclusions about climate change:(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations ofheat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washingtondoes not alter this fact.(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gasesover the last century is due to human activities, especiallythe burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth'sclimate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patternsto change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, includingincreasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologiccycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making theoceans more acidic.(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatenscoastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies,marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments,and far more.Much more can be, and has been, said by the world's scientificsocieties, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusionsshould be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned aboutwhat future generations will face from business-as-usual practices.We urge our policy-makers and the public to move forward immediatelyto address the causes of climate change, including the unrestrainedburning of fossil fuels. We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminalprosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guiltby association, the harassment of scientists by politiciansseeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outrightlies being spread about them. Society has two choices: We canignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope weare lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce thethreat of global climate change quickly and substantively. Thegood news is that smart and effective actions are possible.But delay must not be an option."

----

log january 2011

A climate sceptic prophesied that we would see ever more papers being published in scientific journals opposing the consensus on anthropogenic climate change. From February 2010 to January 2011 I was randomly checking the science and major news outlets for related publications and studies next to new books. These are posted below.

Unfortunately, I cannot see the prophecy being fulfilled. On the contrary, ever more knowledge is pouring in, substantiating the scientific consensus. From a wast array of different fields.

However, what I find very positive, is that some scientists are finally taking the rational and legitimate sceptics serious and are addressing their concerns. This has the possibility to refine the filed of climate science.

Unfortunately, I don't see this having any impact on the public's perception of the issue. As the flooding of the internet with pseudo-science, misinformation and blatant lies has persuaded many people, that, thank god, everything is just fine and the human race's activities have no impact on the planet we live on whatsoever. If only...

Even Skeptics Admit Global Warming is Real; 18 March 2010"The 2,500 or so scientists, economists and other experts of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) call global warming "unequivocal" and think it "very likely" that humans have contributed to the problem. The world's governments agree with the panel, which also shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize.
Then there's the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). These 23 individuals from 15 countries, including a handful of scientists, disagree. Led by physicist S. Fred Singer—best known for his denial of the dangers of secondhand smoke—they argue the reverse: 'Natural causes are very likely to be the dominant cause' of climate change."http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=even-skeptics-admin-global-warming-is-real-video

Hunting for Projects to Help Fish and Wildlife Adapt to Climate Change; 22 March 2010http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hunting-for-climate-change
"For the average United States' city or 'burb dweller, firsthand evidence of climate change is rare. Hunters and anglers see it every day.
That's one of the main messages from a coalition of hunting and fishing organizations that released a report Monday outlining the consequences of climate change for fish and wildlife in the United States."

Expert credibility in climate change; 9 April 2010http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract
"(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers. "

Sensitive side (The cutting edge -newly published NASA research); 05 May 2010http://climate.nasa.gov/cuttingEdge/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowCuttingEdge&CeID=312
"A little extra carbon dioxide in the air may, unfortunately, go further towards warming Earth than previously thought. A team of British and U.S. researchers have uncovered evidence [1] that Earth’s climate may be up to 50 percent more sensitive to long-term increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide than current climate models predict."

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Center for Climate Systems Modelinghttp://www.c2sm.ethz.ch/
The Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM) has been
established to address the scientifically challenging and
socially relevant issue of climate change. While there is
a more widespread acceptance that anthropogenic activities
are significantly influencing the Earth’s climate,
many uncertainties remain in our understanding of the
complex processes involved in the climate system, including
its atmospheric, oceanic, terrestrial, biospheric
and cryospheric sub-components. The overarching goal
of C2SM is to foster and coordinate the development and
application of climate models operating at various scales
to improve our capability to understand and predict the
Earth’s climate, including its weather systems, chemical
composition and hydrological cycle.

New Study Finds Ocean Warmed Significantly Since 1993; 19 May 2010http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-169
"The upper layer of Earth's ocean has warmed since 1993, indicating a strong climate change signal, according to a new international study co-authored by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The energy stored is enough to power nearly 500 100-watt light bulbs for each of the roughly 6.7 billion people on the planet. "

Living in denial: Unleashing a lie; 21 May 2010http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627606.300-living-in-denial-unleashing-a-lie.html?full=true
"IN November 2006, the conservative columnist Piers Akerman published a scathing attack on climate science in Australia's Daily Telegraph. Akerman contended that warnings about warming were deliberately exaggerated. To back his claim, he quoted John Houghton, a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying: 'Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.'
[...]
So the quote's gradual rise to prominence began. It has now appeared in at least three books, well over 100 blog posts and on around 24,000 web pages. It has become a rallying cry for climate deniers. Yet Houghton never said or wrote those words. His 1994 book usually cited as the source contains no such phrase. The first person to publish them appears to have been Akerman."

How climate scientists can repair their reputation ; 02 June 2010http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627624.700-how-climate-scientists-can-repair-their-reputation.html
"They [climate scientists] must realise that they face doubts not just about published results but also about their conduct and honesty. It simply won't work for scientists to continue to appeal to the weight of the evidence while refusing to discuss the integrity of their profession. The harm has been increased by a perceived reluctance to admit even the possibility of mistakes or wrongdoing."

Expert credibility in climate change; 9 April 2010http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract
"Although preliminary estimates from published literature and expert surveys suggest striking agreement among climate scientists on the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), the American public expresses substantial doubt about both the anthropogenic cause and the level of scientific agreement underpinning ACC. A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts has not been conducted and would inform future ACC discussions. Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers. "

Mann is confident these efforts to discredit scientists and undermine climate science will ultimately be judged harshly by history.
'They will continue to attack the science and the scientist," he said. "But I believe that as (the evidence) becomes increasingly compelling, as the public continues to understand that climate change is already unfolding ... we will look back with scorn at those who denied climate change.'"

The climate scandal that never was; 05 July 2010http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/07/the-climate-scandal-that-never-was.html
"In truth, climategate was a pseudo-scandal, and the worst that can be said of the scientists is that they wrote some ill-advised things. 'I've written some pretty awful emails,' admitted Phil Jones, director of the CRU at the time. The scientists also resisted turning over their data when battered by requests for it - requests from climate sceptics who dominate the blogosphere and don't play by the usual rules.

But there is nothing very surprising, much less scandalous, about such behaviour. Yes, a "bunker mentality" developed among the scientists; they were "huddling together in the storm", in Pearce's words. But there really was a storm. They were under attack. In this situation, the scientists proved all too human - not frauds, criminals or liars.

So why were their hacked emails such big news? Because they were taken out of context and made to appear scandalous."

Warming Waters Exacerbate Dwindling New England Fisheries; 13 July 2010http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=warming-waters-exacerbate-dwindling-new-england-fisheries
"A 2007 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looked at codfish catch records over four decades. It concluded what fishermen who know this cold-loving fish would have predicted: As the bottom water temperature increased, the probability of catching a cod decreased.
Last year, a federal effort to coordinate research, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, found ocean warming already was forcing a migration of some species."

Last month was the warmest June ever, NOAA reports; 15 July 2010http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/07/15/warmest.june/?fbid=MsoiUOHbmqZ
"Last month's combined global land and ocean surface temperatures made it the warmest June on record at 61.1 degrees Fahrenheit (16.2 degrees Celsius). That's 1.22 Fahrenheit degrees (0.68 Celsius degrees) higher than the 20th century average of 59.9 (15.5 degrees Celsius)."

Comparative photos of Mount Everest 'confirm ice loss'; 16 July 2010http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10660130
"Photos taken by a mountaineer on Everest from the same spot where similar pictures were taken in 1921 have revealed an "alarming" ice loss."

How facts backfire; 11 July 2010
"Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

The warm, fuzzy side of climate change: Heftier marmots; 21 July 2010
"While polar bears flounder in the face of shrinking ice floes, another furry creature has gotten a boost from climate change. In the past three decades yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) have been fruitful—and multiplied—thanks to longer summers, according to a new study. "

Record-breaking heat does not 'prove' global warming; 22 July 2010
"No: the record-breaking heat does not "prove" global warming. Just as extreme winter weather does not prove the world is cooling,"

Action on carbon is down the drain; 25 July 2010
"The Democratic leadership in the US Senate has suspended efforts to pass a climate change bill. It abandoned not only its planned comprehensive cap-and-trade measure, similar to one already passed by the House of Representatives, but also a more modest bill aimed at electric utilities. The Senate will most likely pass an energy bill of some sort, but this will barely even pretend to make progress on curbing greenhouse gas emissions."http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/19abeff6-981c-11df-b218-00144feab49a.html

Huge ice sheet breaks from Greenland glacier; 7 August 2010
"He said it was not clear if the event was due to global warming.
The first six months of 2010 have been the hottest on record globally, scientists have said."http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10900235

Is climate change burning Russia? 12 August 2010http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19304-is-climate-change-burning-russia.html
"However, it is important to bear in mind that no single weather event can be reliably linked to climate change. "It's a statistical tendency, a push in one direction," says Joanna Haigh of Imperial College London. The Russian heatwave might have occurred anyway, without help from greenhouse gases. All we can say for sure is that such events are more likely in a warmer world."

A melting Arctic hits home; 17 August 2010http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/17/1829447/a-melting-arctic-hits-home.html
"As the Arctic melts due to climate change, its iconic marine mammals are feeling the heat. The Arctic Ocean held less sea ice in June of this year than any previous June on record. For the last four summers, the ice melt has exceeded what even pessimistic climate models predicted only a few years ago."

About the Census of Marine Lifehttp://www.coml.org/about
"Better information is needed to fashion the management that will sustain fisheries, conserve diversity, reverse losses of habitat, reduce impacts of pollution, and respond to global climate change."

Census of Diversity of Abyssal Marine Life (CeDAMar)http://www.coml.org/projects/census-diversity-abyssal-marine-life-cedamar
"Climatic change will reach the deep sea considerably later than other marine environments, but the effects of bottom temperature and the productivity of the surface waters on the environmentally sensitive fauna that live there are expected to be dramatic. CeDAMar will provide a foundation of knowledge about faunal composition, seasonal variations, and the influence of productivity in the deep sea on which any future study of the effects of global warming or human interference will have to rely."

http://protectourwinters.org/
"Protect Our Winters is the environmental center point of the winter sports community, united towards a common goal of reducing climate change's effects on our sport and local mountain communities.

We believe that to really effect things, consumer behavior needs to change and that the power of an actively participating and united community can have a direct influence on climate change, now and for generations behind us."

It was here that Curry began to develop respect for climate outsiders—or at least, some of them. And it made her reconsider her uncritical defense of the IPCC over the years.

Climate skeptics have seized on Curry’s statements to cast doubt on the basic science of climate change. So it is important to emphasize that nothing she encountered led her to question the science; she still has no doubt that the planet is warming, that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are in large part to blame, or that the plausible worst-case scenario could be catastrophic. She does not believe that the Climategate e-mails are evidence of fraud or that the IPCC is some kind of grand international conspiracy. What she does believe is that the mainstream climate science community has moved beyond the ivory tower into a type of fortress mentality, in which insiders can do no wrong and outsiders are forbidden entry.

Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points—and by lumping the good with the bad, climate researchers not only miss out on a chance to improve their science, they come across to the public as haughty. “Yes, there’s a lot of crankology out there,” Curry says. “But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right, that is time well spent because we have just been too encumbered by groupthink.”
"

Merchants of doubt; Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/
"The troubling story of how a cadre of influential scientists have clouded public understanding of scientific facts to advance a political and economic agenda."

Rapid warming boosted ancient rainforest; 11 November 2010http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rapid-warming-boosted-ancient
"Most scientists have assumed that, as carbon dioxide levels increase and the Earth warms, plant species diversity in the rainforests will start to dwindle, with plants unable to adapt to the heat. But a new study suggests that the opposite may be true. In the past, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and higher temperatures actually drove the evolution of far greater numbers of new rainforest plant species than were wiped out.

But don't trade in your electric car for a gas-guzzler just yet--if rainfall drops as temperatures rise, or if they rise too rapidly, the outcome for rainforest diversity could be much less positive."

2010 hottest climate year on record, NASA says; 10 December 2010http://voices.washingtonpost.com/post-carbon/2010/12/2010_hottest_climate_year_on_r.html
"Many scientists use the climate year, which runs from December of the preceding year to November of the current year, to evaluate long-term climate trends. The combined land-ocean temperature readings NASA's Goddard Institute posted Friday indicate that 2010 has surpassed what it identified as the previous warmest climate year, 2005."

Record Warmth in 2010, Despite Cooling Influences; 4 January 2011http://www.climatecentral.org/blog/record-warmth-in-2010-despite-cooling-influences/
"No matter how you crunch the data, 2010 is certain to go down in history as one of the warmest — if not the warmest — years since the beginning of instrumental records in the late 19th century. This is despite the recent cold and snowy weather in much of the U.S. and across Europe."

NASA Research Finds 2010 Tied for Warmest Year on Record; 12 January 2011http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2010-warmest-year.html
"Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record, according to an analysis released Wednesday by researchers at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York."

Taking a closer look at the contrarian claims and assertions by popular and influential climate sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton in the blog post the status of climate scepticism.

Unnoticed by the public, climate scientists continue doing their job, monitoring and researching climate change. Albeit with a new twist: it has been realized, that also human psychology needs to be thrown into the, already very interdisciplinary, mix. Not only the hard science matters, but crucially also subtle issues, like clarifying, constraining and communicating uncertainty. To this aim, the prestigious Nature Publishing Group has issued a new journal: Nature Climate Change, augmenting the physical climate science with insights from social science research. Read the editorial here.

Meanwhile, in the climate sceptic camp, Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has been getting a lot of media attention. He is a prolific, hugely popular and very influential climate sceptic.

Let's see what happens when one gets to the bottom of his contrarian claims and assertions, by the courtesy of youtuber and science journalist potholer54:

Monckton recently lost a legal battle with the BBC over a documentary about climate change scepticism portraying him, called "Meet the Climate Sceptics" (BBC Four), which, he said, would gravely damage his reputation. (See the four youtube clips below.)

The central question is this. It's not whether CO2 or other greenhouse gases can cause warming, because we've known for 200 years that they can. It's not whether we are causing the CO2 in the atmosphere to rise, because we are. The only question that really matters is, given the rate at which we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, how much warming will that cause, if it continues [i.e., climate sensitivity].